We are excited to announce that Prof. Maha Shaikh from ESADE Business School, Barcelona, will be delivering a seminar on Digital Objects Establishing Hybridity in Open Communities.
Abstract: This study focuses on how a specific type of digital artefact, a digital bearer, facilitates and transforms interfacing digital objects in open communities. Open communities rely on openness of access, design, architecture, and blueprints. Open communities also build open products and services. However, in practice, there are facets of open communities that are less open while others are completely closed. We argue that digital bearers, the interfacing component between digital objects influence openness, closedness and hybridity that arises in the community’s product and development processes. Our qualitative study focuses on data across an open source software community and an open hardware community to build a theoretical understanding of how digital bearers establish hybridity. Our study reveals how digital bearers create possibilities for hybridity. We contribute a theorization of how digital bearers are used to both establish and impede particular forms of hybridity of adjacent digital objects as well as the open community in which they are embedded.
Short Bio: Maha Shaikh is an associate professor in the Department of Operations, Innovation and Data Sciences at ESADE Business School. Maha has a PhD in Information Systems from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She has held academic posts at King’s College London and Warwick Business School. Maha is an expert in digital and open innovation with a specific interest in open source communities, and how such online communities draw on algorithms and technology to organize their collective production. Her work has been published in ISR, MISQ, Research Policy, JAIS and more.
